Conversely, we also know that taking longer to build something scalable is more expensive than just building cheaper things that accomplish the job now and solv

Conversely, we also know that taking longer to build something scalable is more expensive than just building cheaper things that accomplish the job now and solving the bigger problems when they’re relevant to the point where it can be the tipping point of success in the first place. In other words, that super reliable bridge that can handle all the growth you throw at it can take longer and too much money and result in a city that fails to have a growth problem in the first place. We know that’s true experientially in both CS (YAGNI) and in the physical spaces (eg Wright brothers constantly iterating with cheap prototypes until they figured out something that worked and SpaceX doing similar things with their prototypes). Iteration = learning. In theory formal methods let you iterate at a cheaper phase of the project. In practice, the methods themselves are very difficult to scale to large projects and these days require you to build the project twice - once for the formal language and then hand-translated to a production language.